Established in 1875 and occupied until the 1920s, Animas Forks is a ghost town northeast of Silverton in the San Juan Mountains . It sits at an elevation of about 11,200 feet. It survived primarily on the strength of speculative investment rather than productive mining, though several nearby mining...

Added by yongli on 11/05/2015 - 10:35, last changed on 08/29/2017 - 08:07

The Beaver Creek Massacre occurred on June 19, 1885, when white cattlemen killed six Ute Mountain Utes at a camp on Beaver Creek, about sixteen miles north of Dolores in present Montezuma County . Stemming from conflicts over the federal government’s Native American policies and the Utes’ off-...

The town of Saguache in the northern San Luis Valley began as an agricultural community after Ute Indians were removed from the area in the 1860s. Saguache boomed in the 1870s and 1880s, when it became an important starting-off point for miners headed to the San Juan Mountains, and again in the...

Silverton is a historic mining town established in 1874 in Baker’s Park in the heart of the San Juan Mountains . After the Denver & Rio Grande Railway (now the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad ) reached the town in 1882, the surrounding region experienced a mining boom that lasted...